The Acolyte

by Nick Cutter

  He socked the prod into my throat and sent another jolt hammering through my system. No pain, only this terrifying sense of confusion: my brain sucked out and the empty skull case stuffed with squirming black beetles.

  “—the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within—”

  A new voice joined Hollis’s. Choked and childlike. My own.

  “The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .”

  Zzaap!

  “. . . maketh me lie down in green pastures; he leadeth . . . me in the paths of . . . of righteousness . . .”

  Zzzzaaap!

  “. . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no . . .”

  Zzzzzzzzzzzaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!

  “My cup . . . my cup runneth . . . my cup . . . my cup . . . my . . .”

  A spark. This fizzling blue pop in the darkness. And another. I willed myself toward the spark only to find I couldn’t: I was back in my body, arms and legs strapped. Then a voice:

  “What do you mean, clemency? We’re talking about the man responsible for the death of The Prophet’s daughter. He’s all but admitted it.”

  I was still seated in the Confessional. The voice belonged to Hollis, who spoke on the interrogation room telephone. The spark came from his cattle prod, which he kept firing off in agitation.

  “No . . . now wait a bloody minute.” Zzap. “This man was part of my unit and we police our own. And if you even think about crossing swords, Exeter . . .” Zzap. “No, that was not a threat: that was a precise foretelling of future history.”

  Was Chief Exeter intervening on my behalf? I wondered, Why?

  “Gabriel wept!”—a snowball-sized spark—“Do you think I won’t request an audience with Him myself? And when I do, do you think your bollocks won’t be swinging from the nearest flagpole?”

  Hollis hung up the phone in a rage.

  “Are you a believer in miracles, Murtag?” he said. “Divine intervention?”

  I said nothing. My lips were sealed with blood.

  “You should,” he said. “You’ve been spared. Word has come down from on high.”

  Edges of sharp metal closed round my right pinkie finger: tin snips or bolt cutters. The punishment was Standard Operating Procedure for gross negligence by an emissary of the Republic. It was the lightest discipline I could expect.

  Hollis said: “Don’t flinch. I don’t want to have to cut twice.”

  Steely pressure, a crunch of bone, the hiss of blood. When Hollis trained a blowtorch on the wound to cauterize it, I blacked out from the pain.

  I regained my senses sometime later.

  I had been strapped to a gurney in a well-lit room. The smell of antiseptic. Everything clean and polished and white. Nurses bustled here and there.

  Angela was strapped to another gurney ten yards away.

  Smiling wanly, she mouthed, “Okay?”

  I mouthed, “Okay.”

  She raised her hand, a clandestine wave. The sight heartened me.

  Hollis had taken my entire pinkie finger.

  He’d only taken the tip of hers.

  Recovery

  I opened my eyes. Ashy afternoon light streamed through the hospital windows. Garvey sat at the foot of the bed.

  The fingers of my right hand were wrapped in gauze to the knuckles. A plug of yellow wax had been melted over the stump of my pinkie. The skin was purple and infected. I hoped it wasn’t gangrene.

  “What’s happening?” I croaked. “What’s to become of me?”

  Garvey chawed on a ball of tobacco. He worked it from one side of his mouth to the other and said, “That’s need-to-know info and I don’t need to know. But as I take it, you’ve been spared.”

  “By who?”

  His eyes rolled heavenward.

  I said: “The Prophet?”

  “You’re alive and within city limits.” Garvey shrugged. “Be thankful.”

  Blisters on either side of my ribcage: electrical burns from Hollis’s cattle prod.

  “Am I still an Acolyte?”

  Garvey said, “So it seems. You and Doe both. But the two of you are under me now.”

  He came round to the head of the bed. Bracing his hands on the mattress, he knelt so his face was level with mine.

  “We’ve been through plenty together, yeah?”

  “Yeah, Garvey.”

  “Faced the heathens, fought side by each—you’ve saved my life more than once and I appreciate that. I love you as a brother under Christ. And I don’t know what happened in that club, with Eve.”

  He paused, thinking maybe I’d divulge something. When I failed to do so, his hands clenched into fists and pulled the bedsheets taut.

  “But if you ever give me reason to doubt your belief, I’ll kill you dead. You mustn’t ever test my loyalties; you’ll lose every time. Fair enough warning?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I know you’re a man who appreciates straight dealing.”

  Garvey reached for a squeeze bottle at the bedside. “Nurse said give you a squirt of this. Knockout sauce, put you back to sleep.”

  I closed my lips around the plastic tube. Sweet fortified wine washed down my gullet. I caught the bitter taste of mandrake root and was gone again.

  I awoke sometime at night. This time Hollis sat at the foot of the bed, smiling at me. In the withered light his teeth looked as if they’d been filed to points. He’d pulled the privacy curtain round the bed.

  “What I did to you was my job. My duty.” He smiled again.

  “Your duty,” I said in a way that indicated I could accept it. “Are we going to be able to continue forward on a . . . professional basis, you and I?”

  “Depends on you, lad. I was simply doing as I was told, no malice intended. You left a crime scene. I am a god-fearing man, and god-fearing men do not carry unjust grudges. Do you carry a grudge?”

  I shook my head no.

  Hollis said, “If I’m going to be stabbed, I’d prefer it in the chest, not my back.”

  I willed my face into a mask. “No grudges.”

  He stared at me for a long time. “We have been put on this earth to spread the One True Faith. We are on the same side, are we not? Those things I said while you were in the Confessional . . .”

  “Duty.”

  “You and Doe have been reprimanded and thus expiated. You may still need to mend fences with your fellow Acolytes, but I’ll do my best to help. We need to maintain a unified front in light of recent events.”

  A horrible sense of loneliness enveloped me, spurred by the understanding that the monster at the foot of the bed might be as close to an ally as I had left.

  “I only cut off the tip of Doe’s finger.” He held this fact out, an olive branch. “Could’ve taken it all. It was mine by right.”

  I fluttered my eyes, feigning exhaustion. Hollis opened the privacy curtain. The moon hung low in the black sky. Eerie orange-tinted light bathed the rooftops and cathedral spires of New Bethlehem. I shut my eyes.

  Morning came. Sunspots sparkled off dangling IV bottles. The sunlight felt wonderful where it touched me. I needed to relieve myself. Fiercely.

  The duty nurse was in conversation with Chief Exeter, who saw I’d awoken.

  “Acolyte Murtag.” Exeter eased himself into the bedside chair.

  “If it isn’t the ghost of Christmas future.”

  He smiled obsequiously. “How are you feeling?”

  Better, but I wasn’t going to say so. “Got to piss like a racehorse.”

  Exeter’s throat flushed above his collar. The man’s prudishness was legendary. The nurse came over with a bedpan.

  “Would you like me to . . . ?” Exeter said. “Shall I turn away?”

  “Don’t bother.�
� I knew it would embarrass him more than it would me, and it’d be wise to put him on the defensive. “It’s the standard plumbing.”

  I swung my legs off the mattress and fished myself from the slit of my hospital gown. Exeter sat with eyes averted, legs crossed, clasped hands resting on one knee.

  The book on Exeter: overeducated—Master’s in Civic Faith Services from Oral Roberts, matching doctorate from Pat Robertson University—but under-experienced. Naturally, I loathed him—despite the fact that, so far as I knew, he was the one who’d saved my skin. But I doubted very much it had been out of the goodness of his heart.

  I said: “To what do I owe this honour?”

  Exeter sighed. “Can’t say as I was expecting graciousness, but I could do without the outright hostility.”

  “Recent events have temporarily put me in an un-Christian spirit.”

  He polished his specs with the hem of his vest. “Are you speaking of your failure to protect The Prophet’s daughter?”

  I took a shaving mirror off the bedside table and consulted my reflection. The sight did nothing to improve my mood: hairless, skin pale as candle wax, eyes surrounded by black rings like washers. My front tooth had broken off during Hollis’s interrogation session. I probed the empty space with my tongue and marvelled at just how witless I looked.

  “You’re alive,” said Exeter. “No broken bones, no internal bleeding. Besides, your duties do not require you to look good.” He aimed for a levity that didn’t suit him. “A scar or two, roughened features—who says those aren’t a plus?”

  “And I take it you’re the reason why I’m not six feet under.”

  To his credit, Exeter’s expression revealed nothing; he finished polishing his specs and slid them onto his test-pattern face.

  “I overheard Hollis on the phone in the interrogation room,” I went on, “in between jolts from his cattle prod. Figure I should be thankful.”

  “I don’t figure as you should be anything at all,” Exeter said after an introspective pause wherein I sensed he weighed the benefits and drawbacks of telling the truth. “I wasn’t aware what was happening to you. As you well know, your unit operates behind a veil of autonomous secrecy.”

  “So, who?”

  He waved my question off. “Does not factor. Suffice it to say, I found out and put an end to it. There was never any intention to have you or Acolyte Doe executed. And that”—he indicated the stump of my finger—“is regrettable, but Deacon Hollis took it as his right. The investigation into the bombing is ongoing. You and Doe are witnesses, which makes Hollis’s actions not only hotheaded but borderline treasonous. What if one of you had been killed? What were you doing in the Confessional in the first place—an oaf with a blowtorch can get whatever admission he wants.”

  The nurse retrieved the bedpan. It was filled with red broth: as much blood as piss.

  “The trend continues,” Exeter said. “Another bombing last night.”

  “Two nights in a row?”

  He shook his head. “You’ve been here three days. They’ve had you medicated on ether and that”—a nod to the bottle of fortified wine and mandrake root—“so I’m not surprised you’re foggy. Nevertheless, two bombings in four nights is an alarming trend.”

  “Where?”

  Exeter’s brow wrinkled. “It happened in Kiketown. An eight-storey storage facility.” In the ghettos, there was no differentiation between warehouses and apartment complexes: all were zoned as storage facilities. “An explosion on the third floor. Seventeen tenants burned to death, another dozen dead of smoke inhalation.”

  Had the explosion taken place in the city proper, the damage would not have been so extensive. But the fire department did not respond to storage facility fires.

  “So . . . it was random?”

  Exeter nodded. “And it’s looking more like The Manger was random. That The Prophet’s daughter was killed can be construed as an unexpected tragedy or bonus, depending on which side you’re on.”

  Random. The most terrifying word in a lawman’s dictionary. If heathens had a modus operandi you could stake out potential targets and zero in. But if they had no specific enemy—if they were aligned against humanity in general—all bets were off.

  Exeter said: “The Prophet will be addressing the death of his daughter during his weekly sermon two days from now. It’s in your best interests you be up and on duty before then.”

  “I’ll be back by tomorrow.”

  “I imagine it may be difficult easing back into things. You Acolytes are an insular crew, and some may harbour a grudge. So if there’s anything I can do in futu—”

  A shockwave trembled through the hospital. Beds jounced, ceiling tiles cracked, IV bottles shattered. Exeter rushed to the nearest window.

  Off to the east, smoke was already rising into the cloudless morning blue. Greasy black streaks were joined by grey funnels spiralling from wreckage too far away to glimpse, yet which I could still picture in my mind’s eye: heat-warped girders blown apart and laying at jigsaw angles, flames shooting from shattered windows, disconnected arms and legs roasting on the blackened brickwork. And screaming. Lots and lots of screaming.

  Exeter said: “That’s in Little Baghdad. My God, even the bombers are being bombed.”

  The lack of civic response told me he was correct. I heard no sirens because no emergency vehicles would be dispatched.

  My blood was buzzing. “This makes no earthly sense.”

  Exeter’s pager went off. He glanced at the number and shut his eyes.

  He would keep his eyes shut for quite some time.

  Article II:

  He Falls the First Time

  Mom

  I checked myself out of the hospital sometime during the witching hour. A trio of charge nurses knelt round me reciting the standard fare-thee-well prayer. One of them gave me a lump of cornbread covered in blue-green mold.

  “Eat it all,” she said. “Helps with your infection.”

  I flagged down a cab. The cabbie dropped me at my apartment building. No key so I hauled myself up the fire escape, cracked my window and clambered awkwardly through. Stink of cordite smoke. Black ash climbing the walls.

  I found the wrapped box in the closet. Mom’s present.

  Raphael’s Roost was a rest home for Cure cases. A squat tri-levelled building in the shape of a U, flaking paint the hue of a diseased liver. Lawn burned so badly all that remained was a fuzz like that covering a tennis ball.

  Inside the Roost, wall sconces burned feebly. The hallways smelled somehow forlorn, as if the emotional states of its inhabitants had impregnated themselves upon the physical bearing of the Roost itself, layer upon crazed layer.

  The overnight orderly was a bovine-looking character. His nametag read: REMO PALLADINI, TRAINEE.

  I set the wrapped box on the inspection table. “My mother’s here. This is for her. Her birthday.”

  Palladini said, “It’s well past visiting hours, Mr. Murtag.”

  “Officer.” I flashed my badge. “Officer Murtag.”

  “Right. Officer. Past visiting hours.”

  “I won’t wake her. I just want to leave the present so she wakes up to it.”

  “You can leave it at the desk.” His lips skinned back from his teeth as if to suggest even this would be putting him in a tight spot. “Maybe the dayshift orderly can get it to her.”

  I asked if he had pen and paper, and when he gave them to me I looked at his nametag before carefully copying his name down.

  “What’s that for?” he said.

  I slipped the paper into my pocket. “Oh, this? It’s nothing. Every so often I get someone’s name and run a background check. The department encourages it.”

  Palladini’s face blanched. His nostrils dilated.

  “Why would you do that? What for?”

  “That’s th
e whole point. It’s random, totally random. The same way policemen in cruisers run the licence plate of the car ahead of them at a traffic light. Ninety-nine percent of the time they’re clean. I’m sure you’re clean—right?”

  Palladini’s jaw tightened.

  “Five minutes, Officer Murtag.”

  My mother was asleep, her white hair fanned over the pillow.

  Honeycombed shadows from the security window sectioned her face, which was pinched with tension. While awake, her face was as placid as a pool of water. That placidity had been carved with the blade of a scalpel.

  I set the box on her dresser. She stirred in agitation, and the smell of the room—sick, same as the hallways—rushed at me, and in the darkness I swore I saw the layers of sickened psyche peeling right off her, thin as onionskin paper.

  Wholesale Slaughter

  Back on duty.

  Just after 7:00 a.m. I’d come to the stationhouse straight from the Roost, changing into my spare uniform in the locker room.

  Sitting at my desk, its frosted-glass gooseneck lamp the only light in the squad room, I jammed the hunk of mouldy cornbread in my mouth. Fibrous fuzz tickled the inside of my cheek. The natural penicillin should help.

  I walked to the Ongoing Investigations corkboard.

  Kidnapping/Attempted Murder. Female victim attacked in Lower Jerusalem near St. Matthew’s Way. Unknown male assailant slashed victim’s throat and took her infant son. Assailant: mulatto with pronounced negroid features. 20–30 yrs. Threat: low. Priority: med. Investigating Acolytes: unassigned.

  Manufacture/Possession of Banned Religious Artifacts. Hindu sect minting statues of Ganesha, Brahma, Shiva and other idols in a 3rd-storey walk-up on Shepherd’s Court. 10 fugitives: 6 captured; 4 remain at large. Threat: low. Priority: low. Investigating Acolytes: remanded to rank & file.

  At 7:45 my fellow Acolytes began to filter in. Martel Applewhite, a god-fearing ex-Baptist who I’d been sworn in beside, didn’t even acknowledge my presence. The others offered poisonous glances.